Mark Mazower

Mark A. Mazower

(1958-02-20) 20 February 1958
London, England

Writer, historian

20th & 21st century

History

Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century

Career[edit]

Mazower received his BA in Classics and Philosophy from the University of Oxford in 1981 and his doctorate from the same university in 1988.[1] He also holds an MA in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins University (1983). Prior to his arrival at Columbia, Mazower taught at Birkbeck, University of London, the University of Sussex and Princeton University.[1]


Mazower has also written for newspapers since 2002 such as the Financial Times and for The Independent contributing articles on international affairs and book reviews.[3][4]


He has been appointed to the Advisory Board of the European Association of History Educators (EUROCLIO).


He is a member of the Editorial Board for Past & Present.[5]

Fields of interest[edit]

Mazower has written extensively on Greek and Balkan history. His book The Balkans won the Wolfson History Prize and Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44, both won the Longman History Today Award for Book of the Year. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430–1950 was the Runciman Prize and Duff Cooper Prize winner and was shortlisted for the Hessell-Tiltman Prize.[6]


In addition, Mazower is more broadly concerned with 20th-century European history. His book Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century argued that the triumph of democracy in Europe was not inevitable but rather the result of chance and political agency on the part of citizens, subjects and leaders.


In Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, Mazower compared Nazi German occupation policy in different European countries.


Mazower's book, No Enchanted Palace, was published in 2009. It narrates the origins of the United Nations and its strict ties to colonialism and its predecessor organisation, the League of Nations. In Governing the World (2012), this narrative is taken one step further, and the history of international organisations in general is evaluated, beginning with the Concert of Europe at the start of the nineteenth century.


Mazower's 2018 inter-generational biography of his own family, What you did not tell, described their lives, education and politics and how it influences his interest in history, place, and the writing of biography.[7] Caroline Moorehead, an acclaimed biographer, on reviewing this book, wrote of his scholarly reconstruction of a family's life meticulously drawn from archives and collections of papers in the UK, Russia, Belgium and Israel and family diaries, letters and interviews.[8] Not simply a biographical narrative, Moorehead explains, since woven into it is a vast and rich picture of left wing European Jewry from the founding of the Bund workers' union. His prodigious historical reach is matched by his affectionate portrait of a family and a people 'whose fight for justice was based on their own personal knowledge of poverty and exploitation.'

Personal life[edit]

In his interview with Mazower, John Crace wrote Mazower "likes walking, football, swimming in Hampstead ponds and dislikes commuting and celebrity culture".[1] In 2021, he was awarded an honorary Greek citizenship for "the promotion of Greece, its long history and culture to the international general public."[9]

Dido Sotiriou Award of the Hellenic Authors Society, 2012

Society of Columbia Graduates Great Teacher Award - 2011

[10]

Honorary doctorate from (during the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the Master of European Studies) - 2019[11]

KU Leuven

Gennadius Prize of the - 2022[12]

American School of Classical Studies at Athens

(Penguin Press, 2021)

The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe

"The Man Who Was France" (review of , De Gaulle, Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 2018, 887 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVII, no. 1 (16 January 2020), pp. 45–46, 48.

Julian Jackson

What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home, (Penguin, 2018.  9780141986845), family memoir

ISBN

Governing the World: The History of an Idea (, 13 September 2012. ISBN 978-1-5942-0349-7)

Penguin Group

No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (, Princeton and Oxford 2009. ISBN 978-1-4008-3166-1)

Princeton University Press

Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (, 2008)

Allen Lane

Networks of Power in Modern Greece, (as editor, , 2008)

C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd

Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (, 2004)

HarperCollins

Ideologies and National Identities: The Case of Twentieth-Century South-Eastern Europe (as co-editor, , 2003)

Central European University Press

After the War was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943–1960 (as an editor, Princeton UP, 2000)

The Balkans (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000) from the 'Universal History' series, reprinted as The Balkans: From the End of Byzantium to the Present Day (Phoenix, 2002)

(Knopf, 1998)

Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century

The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century: Historical Perspectives (as editor, Berghahn, 1997)

Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44 (Yale UP, 1993)

Greece and the Inter-War Economic Crisis, , 1991 (first published 1989), ISBN 0-19-820205-9, also translated in Greek by MIET (2002).

Clarendon Press

Mazower's publications include:

Mazower's official webpage

Mazower's page at the Columbia University website

Ethnicity and War in the Balkans- a short article by Mazower

Mazower on the Armenian genocide controversy

Reviews of Mazower books in Foreign Affairs

Jason R. Koepke on a lecture by Mazower

of Inside Hitler's Greece on "New Books in History"

Review

at The Guardian

Interview

[usurped], a review of No Enchanted Place in the Oxonian Review

'A League Beneath'

on C-SPAN

Appearances